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Cindy Rinaman Marsch

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Rosette: A Novel of Pioneer Michigan (The Ramsdell Family) Kindle Edition

by Cindy Rinaman Marsch (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.0 139 ratings

Part of: The Ramsdell Family (2 books)

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Why did she edit her wedding-day journal?

Almost-spinster schoolteacher Rosette Cordelia Ramsdell married Otis Churchill on a Michigan farm in 1857. Her real-life journal recounts two years of homesteading, history hints at the next six decades, and the novel explores the truth. We meet Rosette in 1888 as she revises the wedding-day page of her journal. In lush detail, in the voices of Rosette and others, the novel traces how we both choose and suffer our destiny, how hopes come to naught and sometimes rise from the wreckage.

In a style reminiscent of Willa Cather, in a family saga that recalls the work of Marilynne Robinson, this novel brings us enduring themes of human life as Rosette and her friends and family make the most of the American pioneer life first detailed for most of us by Laura Ingalls Wilder. One reviewer says this story "makes an anonymous woman equal to the most celebrated hero of legend."

Note that the Kindle version includes only the text of the novel. The paperback version includes 24 charcoal illustrations and highlights in a font created from Rosette's own handwriting.

Now available: a companion short story - "Blizzard: A Story of Dakota Territory."

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Rosette is a remarkable work, a tale well-spun. With every successive wave of joy and sorrow, loss and longing, regret and resolve, broken hearts and healing hearts, readers will be swept into this powerful story and it intimately drawn cast of characters, as I was. Cindy Marsch's writing style is often breathtakingly beautiful, but never purple (quite the writing feat). This is a provocative and delightful novel, not to be missed."
--George Grant, author of The Courage and Character of Theodore Roosevelt and many other titles

"I sat enthralled as I read and couldn't put the novel down. It recalls the work of Willa Cather or Laura Ingalls Wilder with the wonderful details of Rosette's day-to-day life in the structure of the journal. The style just suits the subject, with an impressive capturing of the 19th-century voices. Cindy Marsch alludes to the deeper feelings and underlying tensions in a way that the reader knows what is happening without the characters actually saying it. Rosette's version of her story is moving, her brother and mother add perspective, and her husband Otis reveals his control, his separateness."
--Joy O'Toole, Central Rappahannock Regional Library, Virginia

"Rosette is a wonderfully written, engaging book. I am amazed at Cindy Marsch's ability to voice each of these characters believably, with light but appropriate use of metaphor, and I enjoyed living in their time. The story moves ahead at just the right moment, before we get overwhelmed with daily life. Rosette's marriage really is interesting, and I cannot wait to read the follow-up research. Perhaps with the publishing of Pioneer Girl the time is right for this novel."
--Cindy Ward Rollins, recipient of the 2016 Russell Kirk Paideia Prize, CiRCE Institute

From the Author

When my mother handed me a thrift-store journal find a decade ago and said, "You should write this story," I never realized how fully I would fall into the the world of Rosette Cordelia Ramsdell Churchill. The Michigan pioneer schoolteacher recorded the minutiae of her days and her dreams of 1856-58 but left out many details that might better reveal her real inner life. When I saw the way she had edited her wedding-day journal entry some time later, I knew there was a story to track down. This novel is the result.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01AZLS05A
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Moraine's Edge Books (January 22, 2016)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 22, 2016
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1090 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 238 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #540,367 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #570 in Historical Biographical Fiction
- #723 in Biographical Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #1,459 in Biographical Historical Fiction

Customer Reviews:
4.0 139 ratings

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Cindy Rinaman Marsch

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Cindy Rinaman Marsch was born in Jacksonville, Florida at the end of the Baby Boom, the oldest of seven siblings in blended families. She became a Seminoles football fan at Florida State University, taught at Auburn University, and in 1986 married Glenn Marsch, a professor of physics. The Marsches have four grown children and keep a garden and hobby winery in Western Pennsylvania.

Cindy works as a freelance editor helping other authors realize their publishing dreams, after decades homeschooling her own four children, establishing a now-thriving private school, and teaching online and in colleges. Her own debut novel ROSETTE offers an episode of unknown history with imaginative speculation. The companion short story "Blizzard" adds a chilling episode of Rosette's life. A companion novel, SOLOMON RAMSDELL, debuts in early 2021, with other projects to follow.

The original paintings for the cover of Cindy's books and 24 charcoal illustrations for the paperback version of ROSETTE were completed by Cindy's daughter Betsy. Learn more at BetsyMarsch.com .

Contact Cindy Rinaman Marsch via info@morainesedgebooks.com and through her websites at MorainesEdgeBooks.com and RosetteBook.com.

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4 out of 5

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Karen A. Charbonneau

Marsch's writing is wonderful. The narrative is seamless.

Reviewed in the United States on July 24, 2016

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Rosette is a seamless narrative. Other reviewers have explained the circumstances of Marsch's writing Rosette; I won't duplicate it. My advice to a new reader - allow yourself time to find the rhythm of the novel's phrasing. The 1850s were a more formal time, in manners and speech. Be caught up in Rosette's life as I was. As a student of history, I waited for the small mistake of fact. I found none. You may use this novel as a window into pre-Civil War rural Michigan. I knew that after the virgin timber of Michigan was harvested, homesteaders moved in, preparing their new land for the plow by setting fires beneath the remaining huge stumps (in later years they dynamited them). What does Rosette comment on - the yellow pall of smoke always in the air as the land is slowly cleared. You gain an understanding of why relatives from other states settled near relatives in this new land - interdependence was necessary for survival. Rosette and Marsch demonstrate this so well. Farms were closer than in the American west, and there was socializing and exchange of ideas. And they were never idle. The story of Rosette's and Otis's mismatched marriage is subtle and will break your heart. Rosette was not meant to be a farm wife. It took a strong man and a strong woman to successfully build a paying farm. Otis may seem harsh, but I felt sympathy for him, working for others, unable to quickly construct the large house he'd promised Rosette before they married. Marsch's writing is wonderful. Other reviewers have likened this novel to the works of Willa Cather and Laura Ingalls Wilder. I agree. Karen Charbonneau, Author of Marble Creek, The Wolf's Sun, et al

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Mary Celeste

An account of a year or so of a wilderness adventure in the 1800s.

Reviewed in the United States on October 25, 2016

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A young woman's account of her soujourn in the "wildnerness" (not too wild, but by today's standards and for their middle- class Christian values at that time, yet still scary and adventurous; like extreme camping). It was OK. I was a bit shocked at her Christian holier -than -thou sentiment re: Native Americans, however! She was a very opinionated young lady. It wasiInteresting to follow what they ate and how they prepared it.

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Bev Scott, co-author, Consulting on the Inside, author of Sarah Secret, A Western Tale of Betrayal and Forgiveness writer, retired organization consultant

Based on a real journal from Rosette

Reviewed in the United States on August 10, 2017

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The book opens in 1888 with Rosette’s reflection on her decision to leave her marriage two years earlier, abandon her children who are mostly grown and take the train from Michigan to Dakota Territory to live with her oldest son. This reflection written by the author, emerges from the fragment of a journal entry where Rosette has crossed out her description of her wedding day and inserts “Unholy and Unhappy bonds of marriage” and describes her feelings as “sincerely DETEST and ABHOR."

Marsch then takes us back to an earlier life, introducing the journal of Rosette Cordelia Ramsdell in September 1856. Rosette is an amazingly literate woman, school teacher and accomplished seamstress living in rural Michigan. The story follows Rosette through the courtship, marriage and births of her children and introduces us to members of her family. Marsch uses the brief excerpts from Rosette’s journal to provide authenticity to the story. Marsch presents a story consistent with the journal, which she found and translated, and continues much of the language from it, inventing facts in the story only when necessary. Confessing that she is “fascinated by books that reveal whole persons by unearthing and sometimes embellishing the primary source materials," she has offered a gift to the memory of Rosette and her family. Other than the journal, she found only scraps of information. Rosette and her husband Otis have disappeared into history.

Although I wished for a little more mystery and drama as I read the story, I admire what Marsch has accomplished and followed the story to the end. Rosette gives us an authentic picture of rural life in Michigan in the last half of the 1800’s. That makes it fascinating for those of us interested in history.

4 people found this helpful

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Pamela D. Jenkins

The Human Heart in Another Time and Place

Reviewed in the United States on April 17, 2016

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Rosette, by Cindy Rinaman Marsch, is a work of historical fiction exploring the life of a pioneer woman in Michigan in the mid-nineteenth century, when Michigan was still “the frontier.” The basis of the novel is the actual daily journal of Rosette Cordelia Ramsdale Churchill, discovered in a junk store in Florida; Mrs. Marsch explores and makes credible the startling contrast between the at-times dull, formal, quotidian details of Rosette’s journal and the “hook” apparent in the faded journal, in which someone has altered Rosette’s wedding-day account with pencil.
I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and was pleased by the tone of the stylish prose and dialog, which carefully avoided anachronisms, making the wistfulness of the story even more poignant. In this way the author gives the reader an opportunity to recognize familiar feelings and motivations across the gulf between ourselves and Rosette. Mrs. Marsch allows us to read between the lines a fuller story of the heart of a woman constrained by the customs and proprieties of her time and place.
Her story interests us with fascinating details of frontier life that we have encountered in the works of Laura Ingalls Wilder but with the voice of an adult woman more reminiscent of Willa Cather. At times quite moving, the author’s best work manages, in simple scenes with well-chosen dialog, to capture the dynamics of personality and emotion between a man and a woman in a real marriage. The motivations and characters fleshed out by Mrs. Marsch ring true.
Rosette is a thought-provoking yet pleasant read that should be savored.

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